Every afternoon at my internship, the baby next door cries. Some days he relieves a whimper or two; some days he sobs for 8 hours straight. One day my coworker, Eugene, pulled me aside and told me the story of the house next door.

The baby that I hear crying everyday is a two-year-old boy. He gets locked in his room from dawn to dusk while his mom goes to work. She is a prostitute.

Eugene was telling me that Ghana does not have a structured social services program. Unfortunately, the boy will probably spend his childhood locked in that room. When he grows old, he will have no direction or discipline and may spend the rest of his days locked in another colder, darker room… a prison cell.

I want to march my feet into that house, take that boy away from that home, and raise him as my own; however, I am not fit to be a mother, and I cannot save every troubled kid on the planet. It sucks to realize that, but it is the truth. Maybe I can’t raise this one, but I found out later that there is something I can do.

I continued talking to Eugene, and our conversation stretched from the boy next door specifically to the problem of prostitution as a whole. He told me several stories of young women resorting to selling their bodies to make extra money.

In Ghana, many women spend their days soliciting on the streets. They sell a wide variety of goods including fresh fruit, T-roll, phone chargers, and custom made dresses. The hawkers range in age from 10 to 60 years old. For many families, the income they receive is important for supporting their household.

Many women resort to prostitution at the end of the workday to make up for the inventory that was not sold. These women heavily influence their younger counterparts. These tweens grow up thinking that prostitution is a part of a normal lifestyle. Though they may not want to engage in prostitution, they feel that they have to, which leads to another problem. Some girls are tricked into prostitution. Wealthy men sometimes “sponsor” the young female hawkers, and consistently give their parents enough money to buy the lot of goods. The young hawker is then ordered to report to the man’s house and deliver the products he purchased. Instead of delivering goods, these poor girls are forced to engage sexually with their wealthy sponsors.

Parents usually agree to the transaction; it is easy to be blinded by the sight of large sums of cash when you fight every day to put food on the table. More often than not, the mothers and fathers of these girls are unaware of what is actually happening. The reality hits much later after the girls hit puberty and inevitably become pregnant.

These young girls grow up thinking that rape and prostitution are okay, and I can’t stand the thought of that.

Instead of taking these girls and parentless children out of the hard lives they were brought up in, I will do my best to buy as much as I can from the hawkers, in hopes of keeping the women off of the streets for at least one night.